Good Things

I have been reading One Good Thing lately and think the idea and blog is just so lovely.  It's so easy to get caught up in negativity in school and sit down with people and complain about kids or other teachers or whatever else is going on.  And trust me, I get frustrated and participate with my fair share of complaints often enough.  I'd much rather talk about something funny that happened or something that the kids did really awesome on though.  A place where teachers are talking about good things is very refreshing.

This is my good thing for today:

Today during my algebra class the kids were working on an activity that required them to write a linear equation for a table and a couple kids just totally blanked out on how to do it.  They looked at me and just were so stuck.  I prompted a girl by asking what she needed to know and she said she knew the y-intercept because it was in the table but just didn't know how to get the slope.  

I just smiled at her and told her to look it up in her ISN.  Her and the boy next to her pulled their notebooks out of the bookbags and continued on.  A couple minutes later I hadn't heard anything else from them so I asked if that helped.  They both looked and me and laughed and said they felt so dumb because once they looked it up the remembered exactly how to do it.

I enjoyed this not because they claimed to feel dumb, but because it makes me feel like I'm not wasting my time.  All I had to do was remind them to look it up and they knew exactly where to find it and how to use the information we had written down more than a month ago.  It makes me feel like it is time well spent.  It also gives me hope that next year they will be able to use it as a reference to help remind them of things they have forgotten.